DRAFT

The poetry of Further Up and Further In continues to advance the never-ending story of one man's ongoing spiritual journey, his pilgrimage through a variety of the soi dissant and infamous stages of life to, if all goes according to plan (and let's not beat around the bush here), God. Or what, as they say in the Christian tradition within which Mr. Marks works, sometimes playfully, sometimes not so playfully, sometimes with what can only be called a metaphysical urgency and near panic, the unitary vision of God. As Browning said, " a man's reac... + Read More

In 1998, Manitoba's Conservative government was oozing confidence and appeared certain to cruise to re-election under Premier Gary Filmon. But when a local radio reporter began to investigate rumours about Conservative dirty tricks in the last provincial election, he broke open the scandal that led to a riveting public inquiry, and ultimately to the fall of the government. The Conservatives' vote-splitting scheme was equal parts detective story and comedy of errors, tragedy and farce. Because it had occurred in the hardscrabble Interlake region... + Read More

Douglas Glover’s collection of stories mezmerizes like no other. A sheer tour-de-force, the collection features eleven new stories that demonstrate that Glover is capable of writing like no other writer. Like a good Beatles album, the collection includes Glover’s best new stories, linked only by the quality of the writing. The stories are wide ranging examples of fine, often comic, writing. "The Left Ladies Club" is about a man who leaves teaching to become a writer, giving himself licence to live the bohemian life. In Glover’s merciless portra... + Read More

22 Skiddo takes as its playground the junkyard of Modernity. In a contemporary world which discards memory and experience along with last season's shoes, any building over 25 years old, and millions of tons of last years' computers and cell phones, these poems recycle archeologically recovered materials into a funny, lively exploration of the possibilities of creation in a world where the young think that what Duke Ellington made wasn't really music.If 22 Skiddo reclaims the junk of modern culture, finding for it new forms and arrangements, Sub... + Read More

For his tenth collection, 36 Cornelian Avenue, Christopher Wiseman returns to his wartime childhood in England and revisits the streets, shore, and woods that belonged to the resort town of Scarborough where, his father away fighting, he and his mother lived. In clear, quick-moving colloquial poetry, Wiseman explores how the Second World War affected his neighbours, turning some into curmudgeons, others into compassionate heroes, and how the experience toughened the frightened women and children into survivors, waiting for their men to come hom... + Read More

The Dokic family, like any other, has its problems. Brothers Clint and Darryl are constantly at odds and just similar enough not to cut each other any slack or let past feuds slide. Darryl sees real-estate salesman Clint as a slick boor, overly fond of himself and his achievements. Clint sees Darryl as an over-educated under-achiever, who flaunts his smarts to belittle others. Their mother, Meg, referees their sniping with more knowledge than either of them imagines.

From the days when proto-humans lashed animal jawbones to sticks and whacked wildebeest-poop slapshots in Olduvai Arena to today’s super-high-tech computer-assisted extravaganzas, one by-product of the hockey game has gone unnoticed and untapped. Until now . . . In 50 Things to Make with a Broken Hockey Stick, Peter Manchester transforms the agony of a fractured stick into the thrill of creation. Instructions and explicit cartoons show woodworkers of all abilities how to fashion items for outdoors, items for indoors, and items without any purpo... + Read More

Ken Sparling's nameless new novel is a window, an open door, a means of escape. The novel's narrator---Ken---works at a library. He's drowning in memos, directives, instructions. Words at their most banal. At home, he and his wife have almost nothing to say. Their few words are terse, resentful, wounded. || Ken begins to write a novel, an alternative life for himself and his wife. He gives his wife a lover, a gas man who speaks no English. He gives himself a new language to speak, a poetic language, surreal and hallucinatory, where turke... + Read More

After Morgan Wells's wife leaves him, a postcard from France arrives. It is addressed to a Morgan Wells--but not the Morgan Wells who receives it. Desperate to be led out of his despair, Morgan decides to read the postcard as a sign and embark upon a surreal journey to find, observe, and meet the other Morgan Wellses in the city of Toronto.On the day that a 2003 citywide power outage submerges Toronto in darkness, a teenage boy finds a missive of his own: a copy of Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World, one of the first science fiction novels ... + Read More

A Fit Month for Dying is the third book in M.T. Dohaney’s highly praised trilogy about the women of Newfoundland’s outports. Fans of The Corrigan Women and To Scatter Stones will embrace this new book, while those reading the author for the first time will discover her characteristic bittersweet humour. Tess Corrigan seems to be living the good life. She is a popular politician, the first woman to serve as a Member of the House of Assembly. Her husband Greg is a successful lawyer and son Brendan is a seemingly happy hockey-mad twelve-year-old. ... + Read More

Philosophers, psychologists, and mystics perceive crisis as an opportunity for growth, with the most dramatic crisis being the experience of death. In A Good Enough Life, documentary film writer and director Susan Gabori has turned to this ultimate human experience, revealing the profound paradox of confronting life when faced with the inevitability of death. In monologues shaped from interviews with twelve terminally ill people, Gabori explores how people try to cope with death. Reflecting on the lives they have led and what still lies before ... + Read More

A Guide to Animal Behaviour is a stunning collection of stories by an author who is fast becoming one of the great, innovative story writers of his generation. Following on the heels of his widely acclaimed comic novel, The South Will Rise at Noon, Douglas Glover’s new collection smashes all the fictional moulds. Urbane, stylish, and off-beat, the stories in this collection touch the lives of an astonishing array of characters whose common experience is of a world that is wayward yet full of marvels: a born-again Christian from Kentucky who los... + Read More

In this, her second book, Catherine Black weaves together the wonder, heartache, and “unlovely beauty” of a youth that is by turns charmed and disquieting. Straddling genres of memoir, prose, and poetry, A Hard Gold Threaddelights in the layering of keenly observed moments, in the subtle play of remembering and forgetting, and in the shift in perspective brought to bear on memory as it is transmuted by time. Reverent, sensitively rendered, and sometimes tongue in cheek, A Hard Gold Thread is an unconventional memoir inviting the reader into a m... + Read More

A Hinge of Spring is Patience Wheatley's first published collection of poetry. Wheatley's writing is characterized by a powerful imaginative intelligence; she weaves together literary associations and responses to more immediate experience with an attractive assurance of tone.

Maverick (mav-er-ik, mav-rik) (plural, mav-er-icks): an independent thinker who refuses to conform to the accepted view on a subject. Originally, the term referred to an animal that strayed from the herd. Our instincts drive us towards the herd, believing there’s safety in numbers. Mal Spooner’s new book exposes the bull dished out by decades of advertisements, the press, and others who profit from perpetuating bad investment dogma. The founder of former mutual fund company Mavrix Fund Management Inc., he is well known across the country for hi... + Read More

This new collection from one of our premier poets showcases works of uncommon spirituality, explorations into philosophy and science, as well as evocations of love, grief, and unexpected comfort. This selection includes both new and out-of-print poems from: Until the Light Bends, Uncommon Prayer, Learning to Ride, The Hummingbird Murders, Dangerous Graces, and Dark Galaxies. A Paper Affairencompasses all the stages of McMaster's lyrical and engaging "page poetry" from her first solo collection published in 1986 up to her new poems from 2009 an... + Read More

Mary Pratt is famous throughout Canada for her luminous paintings and prints. Her 1995 exhibition, The Art of Mary Pratt: The Substance of Light, drew record-breaking crowds on its tour of Canada. It also resulted in an unprecedented amount of press coverage on the biographical content of her work. The accompanying book by Tom Smart sold more than 6,000 copies and made almost every "best book of the year" list in Canada. Mary Pratt: A Personal Calligraphy features Mary’s own writings, drawn and adapted from her personal journals, the essays tha... + Read More

The thirteen provocative stories in A Sharp Tooth in the Fur, Darryl Whetter’s first collection, offer lots of sex, a bit of violence, and a wickedly clever exploration of human nature. Backed into emotional corners, Darryl Whetter’s men are creatures of feckless energy and intermittent idealism. Their fragile relationships break up easily, and men who don’t retreat into pot-fuelled lethargy revert to ambitious self-destruction. Excellent as he is at capturing his characters’ essence, Darryl Whetter is mature enough to view the men in particula... + Read More

This fast-paced spy novel featured Winston Spencer, a one-legged, ex-school teacher tricked by circumstances and the SIS into acting as "keeper" for a chess-crazed KGB defector. A Spy in My House is a cold-war spy novel set in Fredericton and Saint John, New Brunswick.

For A Taste of Acadie, Melvin Gallant and Marielle Cormier-Boudreau travelled all over Acadia, from the Gaspé Peninsula to Cape Breton, from the tip of Prince Edward Island to the Magdalen Islands, and around northern New Brunswick and southern Nova Scotia. They gathered the culinary secrets of traditional Acadian cooks while there was still time, and then they adapted more than 150 recipes for today’s kitchens. First published in 1991, A Taste of Acadie, the popular English translation of the best-selling Cuisine traditionalle en Acadie, is av... + Read More

Peter Richardson's debut, A Tinkers' Picnic, introduced a new variety of tough talk to Canadian poetry with poems that, in their force-of-nature irrepressibility and verbal derring-do, typified nothing less than their own one-of-a-kind verve. With An ABC of Belly Work, Richardson has written another book of tall-tale, outsized poems full of aggressive banter and oddball colloquialisms. What sets Richardson apart, however isn't so much the way he frisks his poetry with free-wheeling and unpredictable touches, but the sincere fervency he brings t... + Read More

Based on the novel by Bruce Allen Powe, The Aberhart Summer is a dark &quotcoming of age&quot story where desperation, secrets, and tragedy affect the lives of the people in an Edmonton neighbourhood during the Depression. A mystery, a comedy, and a gripping look at Alberta history.

It is the summer of 1935, and while young Doug Sayers is spending the summer going to movies and sneaking cigarettes and his friend Babe Roothe is discovering women, William Aberhart and the Social Credit Party are promising twenty-five dollars a month for everyone in Alberta. Babes mysterious death is the first in a chain of bizarre events, freak thunderstorms, and political intrigue. /

30.

Series: Abode of LoveGrowing Up in a Messianic CultFirstPaperbackKate Barlow9780864924575$19.95RELIGION Sep 08, 2006

When Kate Barlow was a little girl, she moved with her mother and her older sisters to a ramshackle English mansion. They were not alone on the once-grand estate, surrounded as they were by twenty eccentric, elderly women, one of whom was her grandmother . . . or was she? This remarkable memoir is the true story of life inside "The A," the infamous Agapemone, named for the Greek word meaning Abode of Love. It was a religious cult founded in mid-19th century England by a defrocked clergyman who claimed to be guided personally by the Holy Ghost. ... + Read More

Aboriginal rights do not belong to the broader category of universal human rights because they are grounded in the particular practices of aboriginal people. So argues Peter Kulchyski in this provocative book from the front lines of indigenous people's struggles to defend their culture from the ongoing conquest of their traditional lands. Kulchyski shows that some differences are more different than others, and he draws a border between bush culture and mall culture, between indigenous people's mode of production and the totalizing push of stat... + Read More

A first in sporting literature, “The Aboriginal Soccer Tribe” is the largely untold story of Aboriginal involvement with the world game. The acceptance that Aboriginal players found within the post-World War II migrant communities had a profound impact on their lives. The multicultural environment of Australian soccer provided them with a haven from the prejudice and racism of wider Australian society. Interweaving personal stories and extensive research with links to the broader Indigenous world community, this book is a celebration of the ext... + Read More

John Loxley has worked in community economic development as a practitioner, advisor, teacher and scholar for over 30 years. The wealth of that experience is reflected in this book, which grapples with the conceptual and political complexities of addressing northern and Aboriginal poverty.Loxley examines a number of possible approaches to economic development, placing each within a broader theoretical and policy perspective, and considering its growth potential and class impact.Accessible and theoretically sophisticated, the book blends internat... + Read More

Pictures of one kind or another surround us in our everyday lives, so much so that we assume they been with us forever. Not so. In this readable and witty account, Terry Fenton takes the reader on a journey through the history and characteristics of this omnipresent aspect of our art and culture. Over thirty colour images--many drawn from the collections of great museums--bring depth and understanding to various art periods, styles and genres. As the title suggest, About Pictures is about pictures: what they are, where and when they arose, how ... + Read More

The river winds through Above and Below the Waterline, the first collection of poetry from novelist, Marianne Paul. The author navigates the joy and the grief that is life in the process of being lived, those events and passages that mark the flow of time, the undercurrents of family, the rough waters and calm waters, the challenges and dysfunction - but beneath it all, love. Water speaks volumes, Marianne Paul tells us. The paddler learns to read river in the same way a child learns to read symbols on the page - the contours and patterns that ... + Read More

In these passionate poems, this long poem, there is a story (there are stories) which a reader mines out of a landscape of language moulded under great pressure and eloquent of the stresses that formed it. This is non-representational work of great concentration and beauty."The skill and intense ardor of the mind at work ... is delightful. The least one can learn from poetry that makes sweet music of the intelligence is that we can still measure, have measure." -- Fred Wah, Books in Canada

Tormented by his wife's decision to abort their child, a psychologist travels to a small coastal fishing town in South America to distance himself from the situation. It is the same town where his father once stayed after abandoning his family. There, he discovers many unsettling truths about himself and his family. The Abundance of the Infinite is a book about the redemptive power of dreams.

This is a large-hearted book, full of stories and observations that will startle and delight the reader. The strength of Trussler's writing is his ability to reveal a worldly view, in a voice that sings of the personal and the universal in a way that is defies expectation.

A finely-crafted collection of short stories, Acountable Advances reveals the strange and subtle nuances of everyday life, life in 1957, hidden lives, lives in crisis, and lives just beginning. When a young couple is caught planning premarital sex while "Courting in 1957," her seemingly progressive parents lock them in a bedroom and won't release them until they carry out their plan.

Jane Munro’s newest collection of poetry, Active Pass, explores connections among the visual arts, yogic discipline and self-regeneration. The book opens with a suite of ghazals arising from the conflicts in mid-life, moves into poems about Mary Pratt’s paintings and closes with a reflective sequence called “Nearer Prayer than Story.” The book’s title comes from the name of a marine channel in British Columbia. Midway on its crossing from Tsawwassen to Swartz Bay, a ferry enters Active Pass, a scenic but dangerous strait where visibility is lim... + Read More

Set in the present day, John Wilson's young adult novel Adrift in Time explores the tensions in family life between parents and children. It also demonstrates how the new generation's knowledge of the family's past can ease those tensions. The novel opens with Ian, a teenager, finding that he no longer enjoys spending his summer holidays at the family cottage on Mayne Island in British Columbia. He misses the fun of being with his friends in the city. Arguments with his father grow more and more frequent, and Ian feels that his dad refuses to ... + Read More

Do you have a name such as Willow, River, Oak or Sunshine? Have you ever lived on a commune, or done yoga naked with your family? If yes, then you are an Adult Child of Hippies (ACOH). Adult Children of Hippies grew up in extreme conditions: eating sprouts, and lugging herbal tea in their Thermoses to school (if they were fortunate enough to make it to school). ACOHs were born and brought up mostly in the 70s and 80s. As their parents reveled in the counterculture, ACOHs struggled with basic hygiene, not to mention broader social acceptance. ... + Read More

At the time of writing this book, William Robertson was a homemaker. His poems bring a new passion to the ancient domestic scene, and to everything else he looks at out of that often-turbulent centre. He ventures with care "into a swelling sea/ of silted meanings" equipped with his own elegant flexible vernacular, shaped precisely to the task of lighting up the trials and wonders of ostensibly ordinary days. These poems ring like crystal-hard edges of a tender heart.

Heir to the Hipster line of rabbinical leaders and sages, eleven year old Micah Mushmelon enlists Shraga Potasznik, the comic-book-addicted protagonist of this novella to make good of all things worthwhile in this world. An heir to the rich modern Yiddish literary tradition, Michael Wex paints a vivid, hilarious picture of the hasidic demimonde. His is a view into Yiddish culture at once erudite and super hip, and always true to the cadences of a language that informs so much of modern North American culture.

Adventures with Camera and Pen is a collection of tales from Anthony Dalton ?s nomadic life as an adventurer and photo-journalist. The stories run the gamut from searching for Polar bears on the shores of Hudson Bay through mountain climbing in Western Canada to tracking Royal Bengal tigers in Bangladesh jungle. They depict Dalton?s often hilarious encounters with an eclectic variety of wildlife in the Canadian Arctic, the Falkland Islands and Namibia. He recounts his adventures at sea on tall-ships, and his fumbling attempts at fishing closer ... + Read More

Ranging in form from elegy to satire to metaphysics to blues, Christopher Doda's latest book, Aesthetics Lesson, is an exciting meditation on art and power. His poems investigate the Ôunnamed cities of light' created by the artist, reflecting and dissecting how the creative impulse can lead to both solace and destruction. Centred around the title piece, a crown of self-generating glosas that examine the role of the artist in our mechanized and digitized society, Aesthetics Lesson offers a potent landscape not easily forgotten. Love and anger, r... + Read More

Fascinated by the ligature -- a joining of two letters in a single word -- Donato Mancini chose, logically, to conjure one up in the title of his second book of concrete poetry, Æthel. "Although," as Mancini remarks parenthetically, "it might be the name of the crabby old blue-rinse who calls the police if you cross her lawn." Æthel, the book, is anything but crabby. Mancini's further iteration of the titular character, now in medieval guise, as "the kind of person who might've razed your village or died as King while still a pup" gives some in... + Read More

Afloat, John Reibetanz's eighth collection of poetry, focuses on water in many manifestations. The centerpiece, a sequence on the Three Gorges Dam and its cultural and environmental implications, brings ancient Chinese sources (Meng Chiao and the painter Dong Yuan) together with modern ones (Edward Burtynsky's photographs and violent video games) to create an elegy that is moving and meditative.Although water is everywhere present as a subject, it is song that provides the motivating power, the vehicle of longing that animates the book. "We thi... + Read More

"Don't gaze into the abyss," George Stanley states in his new book. "Gaze out." And this is what the reader receives from Stanley's eighth book, After Desire: the observations of a poet, and a consciousness, as they arrive together at old age. Not what the poet is thinking --- although we get to watch him thinking too --- but what he sees and notices; what he is thinking about. This might be the different effect that Beauty has on him, after desire has fled, "stripped of even the desire for desire." This might be a contemplation of what it is ... + Read More

After it Rains, Bill Haugland’s first short story collection, gently probes the human psyche and deftly reveals our foibles. What happens to a man who faces the loss of home and property after the worst economic downturn in decades? Is a novelist’s coma, in fact, a hidden doorway? Can a photograph, found in an antique store, be the key to a turbulent past? What drives a young man to leap from a bridge in a failed suicide attempt? Should a wife and mother decide to abandon her family in a desperate moment of introspection? Does a blind boy posse... + Read More

After Rilke is the culmination of more than five years work. I began thinking about the sounds of words (rather than their meanings) the summer of 2001 while reading from bpNichol's whimsical translations of both Catullus and Apollinaire. It was these works that got me going, opened my mind to other possibilities. However, it was Louis Zukofsky's Catullus that asked me to put pen to paper. I'm unsure when Rilke's The Voices entered in, but it was early on. Only later did Spicer begin to help me re-arrange the furniture -- the Martians have been... + Read More

Set in the colourful, intense, competitive Montreal of the 1980s, Harrison’s novel explores the efforts of two couples to reach beyond the boundaries of self. Their tangled relationships hang in precarious balance, with the individuals drifting towards confrontation and an awkward, though dramatic, reckoning. After Six Days is written in taut, contemporary prose, its short, explosive scenes alive with the authentic feeling of urban life now.

After the 6ix O'clock News is poetry for inside and out of the eyeball. It is not a declaration of wart or a treaty of verse eyes, it is bigger than that. This is poetry that has to be heard to be seen: to be taken out to be turned in. Babineau's breaking open of the seedpod of genre has resulted in poems strewn about town, yard, and beyond. What grows is an insurgent response to the hiss of is through the conductivity of the eclectic.